‘HOW DECADES OF U.S. WAR IN IRAQ SHAPED — AND SCATTERED — ONE FAMILY’ “‘I used to be okay,’ said Hilda Simonian, who regularly suffers from paranoia and flashbacks 20 years after reaching safety in Canada.” [HuffPost]

By a margin of 2 to 1, Americans now say 15 years after the Iraq War that it was a mistake.

Fifteen years ago today, on the night of March 20-21, 2003, the armed forces of the United States and Great Britain began an illegal and unprovoked invasion of Iraq, a country of 26 million people. As bombs and missiles began to rain down on Iraq’s cities, and tanks and armored vehicles crossed the border from Kuwait, US President George W. Bush set in motion a war of aggression whose catastrophic consequences now shape world politics: here.

June 27, 1993: The US military unleashed 23 Tomahawk cruise missiles on Baghdad, the capital city of Iraq, in what President Bill Clinton intended as a show of “toughness” against the regime of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. At least eight civilians were killed when three of the cruise missiles slammed into a residential neighborhood in the early hours of the morning.

Among the dead were Layla al-Attar, a museum curator and well-known Iraqi painter, and most of her family. The missile struck her sister’s house, where al-Attar was living while her own home, badly damaged by US bombs in the Persian Gulf war of 1990-91, was being repaired.

The missiles were fired by two US destroyers, the USS Peterson, operating in the Red Sea, and the USS Chancellorsville, operating in the Persian Gulf. Most of the missiles struck a building identified as the headquarters of the Iraqi Intelligence Service.

The pretext for the raid was a claim by CIA officials that the Iraqi intelligence Service was responsible for an alleged assassination plot against former president George H. W. Bush during his visit to Kuwait in April 1993, which was broken up ahead of time by Kuwaiti security forces. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh subsequently reported that the explosive devices “found” by the Kuwaitis were of commonplace design and probably not even manufactured in Iraq. Newsweek magazine devoted its cover story to the decision-making process inside the White House which led to the murderous assault, glorifying the role of Clinton, his chief military adviser Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Vice President Gore. The magazine was given unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to chronicle the seven days that led up to the attack.

Clinton gave a television address on the raid, then slept for eight hours, pronouncing it “the best sleep I’ve had in months.” The International Workers Bulletin commented, “For Clinton, the former antiwar protester, killing Iraqis is all in a day’s work, barely interrupting his late-night snacks. Murdering civilians in their sleep only makes his own sleep more sound.” The IWB noted that Clinton carried out the raid largely for domestic political reasons, after weeks in which he had been ridiculed for “weakness” and “indecision” in the media.

Sparked by Wikileaks’ release of classified US military documents, this investigation uncovers how the Pentagon sent James Steele, a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America, to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from fighters.

Composed of violent Shia militias, these commandos evolved into death squads and eventually numbered over 17,000 men.

General David Petraeus is also implicated in the chain of command in this abuse of human rights. Colonel James Coffman, another special forces veteran drafted in to oversee the operation, describes himself as Petraeus’ “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They knew everything that was going on there, the most horrible kinds of torture,” says General Muntadher al-Samari, speaking for the first time about the US role in the interrogation units. Ten years on from the invasion, the long-term effect this paramilitary force has unleashed is a deadly sectarian militia that has helped germinate a civil war claiming tens of thousands of lives.